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AIOps: A Beginners Guide - Part 1

Vinay Chandrasekhar
Elastic

Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (or AIOps for short) continues to be a hot topic among developers, SREs, or DevOps professionals. The case for AIOps is especially crucial given the expansive nature of today's observability efforts across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. As with most observability challenges, AIOps starts with telemetry data: metrics, logs, traces, and events.

Once IT operations teams collect and begin to analyze the data, the benefit of AIOps becomes rapidly clear. AIOps aims to accurately and proactively identify areas that need attention and assist IT teams in solving issues faster. As human beings, we cannot keep up with analyzing petabytes of raw observability data. Adding AIOps delivers a layer of intelligence via analytics and automation to help reduce overhead for a team. Let's dive in to answer common questions on this critical topic.


What Is AIOps and How Can It Help Me?

Simply put, AIOps is the ability of software systems to ease and assist IT operations via the use of AI/ML and related analytical technologies. AIOps capabilities can be applied to various operational data, including ingestion and processing of log data, traces, metrics, and much more.

Seeking to clarify the often murky and confusing world of AIOps are Gartner, Forrester and others who provide market definition. AIOps can help significantly reduce the time and effort to detect, understand, investigate, determine root cause, and remediate issues and incidents faster. Saving time during troubleshooting can, in turn, help IT personnel focus more of their energy on higher-value tasks and projects.

Why Do You Need AIOps as Part of Your Observability Strategy?

Many recent articles (Gartner glossary for AIOps, Forrester AIOps reports) describe the dynamics in the IT market. From digital transformation initiatives to cloud migration to distributed, hybrid, or cloud-native application deployments, these dynamics are dramatically changing the IT operations landscape.

The landscape changes have the following three characteristics:

Data volume: The volume of data for observability continues to increase exponentially.

Complexity: Applications, workloads, and deployments continue to become more complex, ephemeral, and distributed.

Pace of change: The rate at which changes (application and infrastructure) occur is faster than ever before.

These are not mutually exclusive. In some ways, quite the opposite. For example, high rates of change and complex deployments utilizing auto-scaling mean an even higher volume of data. This increasing complexity means that humans will depend on systems and automation to keep up with the changes. For this reason, AIOps will play a key role in responding to these operational and business challenges.

Leveraging AI/ML to roll up data, summarize it, and intelligently tier the data for storage can help alleviate some of the volume challenges. Explicit visual depictions of an application environment (infrastructure and service dependency maps) and contextual navigation help align troubleshooting efforts with how users think of their deployment. Furthermore, auto-surfacing of problems and root causes analyses will address some of the other complex challenges.

Observability products will need to keep track of all application and infrastructure changes and correlate those changes with system behavior and user experience because change is often the root cause of acute, anomalous behavior. An upgrade or patch for a new feature with unintended consequences is a typical example. Enabling those correlations helps teams be more agile and adept at keeping pace with those frequent changes helping sustain service performance.

AIOps play a key role and can help navigate these challenges effectively, freeing up operations teams to focus on more important work when properly implemented and used.

Which Observability Use Cases Are Best for AIOps?

Several observability workflows and use cases are already very well served with the application of AIOps techniques and technologies, for example:

■ Service degradation such as sudden or unexpected variations in latency can be detected via anomaly detection.

■ Massive volumes of data, such as unstructured or semi-structured log messages, can be automatically classified, categorized, and summarized to help ease consumption and analysis.

■ Multiple symptoms, events, and issues can be correlated to help cut down alert "noise" and reduce time to root cause determination.

■ Automatic health scoring based on an assessment of impact, the extent of anomalies, and other measures help surface the most critical issues first, further reducing noise.

In the more well-understood and time-tested "if this is the symptom, then this is the likely root cause" relationships, AIOps can help automatically look for, detect, and classify those symptoms and surface those potential root causes. Ultimately, AIOps can enable remediation actions to fix routine or trivial issues and reduce burnout for operations teams

In a future blog, we will dive deeper into key use cases and how you can identify scenarios to apply AIOps in day-to-day operations.

Vinay Chandrasekhar is Sr. Principal Product Manager, Observability, at Elastic

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AIOps: A Beginners Guide - Part 1

Vinay Chandrasekhar
Elastic

Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (or AIOps for short) continues to be a hot topic among developers, SREs, or DevOps professionals. The case for AIOps is especially crucial given the expansive nature of today's observability efforts across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. As with most observability challenges, AIOps starts with telemetry data: metrics, logs, traces, and events.

Once IT operations teams collect and begin to analyze the data, the benefit of AIOps becomes rapidly clear. AIOps aims to accurately and proactively identify areas that need attention and assist IT teams in solving issues faster. As human beings, we cannot keep up with analyzing petabytes of raw observability data. Adding AIOps delivers a layer of intelligence via analytics and automation to help reduce overhead for a team. Let's dive in to answer common questions on this critical topic.


What Is AIOps and How Can It Help Me?

Simply put, AIOps is the ability of software systems to ease and assist IT operations via the use of AI/ML and related analytical technologies. AIOps capabilities can be applied to various operational data, including ingestion and processing of log data, traces, metrics, and much more.

Seeking to clarify the often murky and confusing world of AIOps are Gartner, Forrester and others who provide market definition. AIOps can help significantly reduce the time and effort to detect, understand, investigate, determine root cause, and remediate issues and incidents faster. Saving time during troubleshooting can, in turn, help IT personnel focus more of their energy on higher-value tasks and projects.

Why Do You Need AIOps as Part of Your Observability Strategy?

Many recent articles (Gartner glossary for AIOps, Forrester AIOps reports) describe the dynamics in the IT market. From digital transformation initiatives to cloud migration to distributed, hybrid, or cloud-native application deployments, these dynamics are dramatically changing the IT operations landscape.

The landscape changes have the following three characteristics:

Data volume: The volume of data for observability continues to increase exponentially.

Complexity: Applications, workloads, and deployments continue to become more complex, ephemeral, and distributed.

Pace of change: The rate at which changes (application and infrastructure) occur is faster than ever before.

These are not mutually exclusive. In some ways, quite the opposite. For example, high rates of change and complex deployments utilizing auto-scaling mean an even higher volume of data. This increasing complexity means that humans will depend on systems and automation to keep up with the changes. For this reason, AIOps will play a key role in responding to these operational and business challenges.

Leveraging AI/ML to roll up data, summarize it, and intelligently tier the data for storage can help alleviate some of the volume challenges. Explicit visual depictions of an application environment (infrastructure and service dependency maps) and contextual navigation help align troubleshooting efforts with how users think of their deployment. Furthermore, auto-surfacing of problems and root causes analyses will address some of the other complex challenges.

Observability products will need to keep track of all application and infrastructure changes and correlate those changes with system behavior and user experience because change is often the root cause of acute, anomalous behavior. An upgrade or patch for a new feature with unintended consequences is a typical example. Enabling those correlations helps teams be more agile and adept at keeping pace with those frequent changes helping sustain service performance.

AIOps play a key role and can help navigate these challenges effectively, freeing up operations teams to focus on more important work when properly implemented and used.

Which Observability Use Cases Are Best for AIOps?

Several observability workflows and use cases are already very well served with the application of AIOps techniques and technologies, for example:

■ Service degradation such as sudden or unexpected variations in latency can be detected via anomaly detection.

■ Massive volumes of data, such as unstructured or semi-structured log messages, can be automatically classified, categorized, and summarized to help ease consumption and analysis.

■ Multiple symptoms, events, and issues can be correlated to help cut down alert "noise" and reduce time to root cause determination.

■ Automatic health scoring based on an assessment of impact, the extent of anomalies, and other measures help surface the most critical issues first, further reducing noise.

In the more well-understood and time-tested "if this is the symptom, then this is the likely root cause" relationships, AIOps can help automatically look for, detect, and classify those symptoms and surface those potential root causes. Ultimately, AIOps can enable remediation actions to fix routine or trivial issues and reduce burnout for operations teams

In a future blog, we will dive deeper into key use cases and how you can identify scenarios to apply AIOps in day-to-day operations.

Vinay Chandrasekhar is Sr. Principal Product Manager, Observability, at Elastic

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...